The world of wireless communications is generally dominated by a few companies, with some of them being hardware suppliers and others being chip suppliers.

Qualcomm, Broadcom and Marvell are some of the leading chip suppliers of wireless technologies for both the home and smartphones while Samsung, Cisco, Apple and Dell provide much of the hardware for consumers and enterprise. Recently, Qualcomm acquired a company called Wilocity which has been producing 60 GHz (as opposed to 5 or 2.4 GHz) frequency Wi-Fi systems. This 60 GHz technology is known as WiGig and is part of the Wi-Fi standard with the 802.11ad name. If you look up 802.11ad, in fact, you will see that 60 GHz Wi-Fi is marketed as WiGig (there is a WiGig alliance) which Samsung is even a part of and the alliance has existed since 2009.

WiGig is an interesting technology because it allows for much higher bandwidth (in the Gigabits per second) over shorter areas. So, you can put your phone down on a desk and WiGig will enable you to wirelessly stream/connect your phone to your monitor and keyboard so that you can dock it wirelessly. In fact, Wilocity has already partnered with Cisco to introduce WiGig into their enterprise products and with Dell to integrate WiGig into their laptops. WiGig is also on its way to consumer product adoption as Qualcomm, who acquired Wilocity, has already announced that their Snapdragon 810 processor will have WiGig built in. And if anything, there’s a very high chance that Samsung’s mobile products next year will be using a Snapdragon 810 with Qualcomm/Wilocity’s WiGig 802.11 Wi-Fi technology.

Today’s announcement is about the fact that Samsung has developed their own 802.11ad solution and are pushing it as such, they claim to have made vast improvements to wireless communications through their implementation. The WiGig 60 GHz WiGig standard has been finalized since 2012 and was initiated in 2009 and has not changed wildly since, which makes Samsung’s announcement seem a bit overblown. Samsung has not really announced anything about WiGig or any development of WiGig publicly until today, years after WiGig had been introduced so they actually seem a bit behind the curve. It will be interesting to see which Samsung products will have WiGig and whether they’ve developed their own chipset or are simply utilizing one from Qualcomm or someone else.

Also, in terms of WiGig the problem with 802.11ad is that it is very susceptible to interference from dense objects like couches and people. So, this technology is primarily used for ‘line-of-sight’ data transfers and wireless connectivity. But it does significantly reduce the amount of interference between different wireless access points as 802.11ad will rarely leave the bounds of the room it is installed in.

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WiGig is a technology that has been developed by Wilocity with the help of various industry partners, including Cisco, Marvell and Qualcomm. We’ve been following the company for years and have been able to see their technology develop little by little into a truly mobile technology. They’ve moved from a proof of concept all the way to integrating their technology into laptops and smartphones. From our experience, their laptop technology is far more mature than their mobile technology, however they have made significant strides in terms of improving the technology’s performance and usability. They already have their WiGig technology working in some of Dell’s laptops and as a result they’ve got plenty of ideas for using WiGig for docking laptops wirelessly to displays and storage.

The technology itself is a 60 GHz wireless technology which is capable of delivering in excess of 1 Gbps in bandwidth wirelessly as long as it is within the line of sight of the receiver. However, due to the fact that 60 GHz is still a radio technology it doesn’t necessarily have to exactly be line of sight. Its just that 60 GHz does not penetrate walls necessarily well, which isn’t a bad thing nowdays in a world where we actually have so many 2.4 and 5 GHz signals that they’re interfering with each other and affecting performance. WiGig’s primary applications are within the same room, meaning that you can wirelessly connect your phone to your TV without needing to be connected to the Wi-Fi network and having to cover the entire house with a wireless signal for that purpose alone, or sharing that bandwidth with other devices on the network.

This technology will become part of Qualcomm’s technology portfolio and will actually be interesting to see how many of Wilocity’s current partners who are also Qualcomm’s competitors will receive the technology. The reality is that we’ll likely see WiGig become part of Qualcomm’s product stack but they may also still encourage others to utilize their 802.11ad application in order to help the technology grow since its introduction a few years ago. Qualcomm was actually one of the first adopters of WiGig, so they clearly have been happy with the progress of the technology since their inclusion in 2012.

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